Bill Pinney (IRVINE & WITTRUP LABS)

Pumping the Brakes: Modulating Intratumoral Cytokine Signaling to Bolster Immunological Memory

Intratumoral cytokine therapies have emerged as an exciting platform to address unmet needs in cancer treatment. While capable of potently activating anti-tumor immune responses however, successful tumor clearance with cytokine therapies often comes at the expense of immunological memory. Here we present a counterintuitive result utilizing a blockade of inflammatory signaling to invigorate T cell stemness, bolstering immunological memory while enhancing tumor rejection.

Pallavi Balivada (BIRNBAUM LAB)

Identifying Cross-reactive Peptide Mimotopes for Autoreactive T cells in Type 1 Diabetes

Type 1 diabetes is an autoimmune disease characterized by T cell-mediated destruction of pancreatic beta cells. Selectively deleting these autoreactive T cells could mitigate disease. Inspired by cancer immunotherapy, therapies could target T cell receptors (TCRs) on autoreactive T cells using peptide-MHC (pMHC) as a recognition domain. To account for a polyclonal T cell response, targeting peptides must bind multiple T cell clones with high affinity. In this work, we sequence autoantigen specific TCRs from patients with T1D and design yeast surface display pMHC libraries to screen for highly active, cross-reactive peptides.